The First Academic Year Has Ended
This morning I finished the last exam, biochemistry, and with that, this academic year is officially over for us.
Many cars arrived at the school; they were parents coming to pick up their children. These parents are generally a bit younger than I am; mixed in with the crowd, I look more like a parent than a student. After several days of exams in a row, I am a little tired.
This time we have been taking exams on and off for three weeks; this semester there are 11 courses in total to be tested: pathology, physiology, biochemistry, pathogenic microbiology, immunology, rehabilitation medicine, medical ethics, medical psychology, and several other courses. The daily schedule was packed; to prepare seriously for the exams was actually quite demanding, and I have held on through it.
The exam month required too much to recite and memorize. But fortunately, it seems God has forgotten me: at my age, my rote-memory ability is still excellent. Review materials of one to two hundred pages and more than two thousand exercise questions could be memorized thoroughly in about a month, and the exams were not difficult for me.
Most of the time I finished the paper with more than half the time to spare, and my scores were not low. The rehabilitation-medicine teacher was the first to tell me my score: I got 97 (out of 100) in that course. The scores in the other major courses should mostly be above 90 as well. At our school it is not hard to pass, but scoring above 90 in an examined course is not easy either.
To study clinical medicine well, one must have a good memory. Most people's memory declines sharply by my age, but my memory has not declined noticeably; I memorize things faster than the young people around me, and retain them more firmly. I am good at forming logical memory. Every finals season, I invariably sort through the knowledge points of all the major courses studied that semester, organize them into a coherent structure, and then memorize them; in this way the memorized points form a system.
Thus, for each course I generally produced a 6–10-page review outline, plus a 5–6-page set of core points to be memorized verbatim, plus a 10-page or so set of commonly mistaken points—a total of 20–30 pages of documents. After printing them out, I read them repeatedly until every knowledge point was thoroughly mastered. Having reviewed to that degree, once I opened the paper, I could answer the questions quickly, almost without thinking.
University exams are generally not difficult, unlike the national college entrance examination, which has new tricks every year. The questions for various university majors do not change much over the years; for medical majors, at most they add in questions that have appeared in recent years' medical licensing exams. So as long as a person is willing to study as I did, it is not hard to score high.
But reviewing this way is indeed quite strenuous. After finishing all the exams, I felt a splitting headache. Once I got on the high-speed train, I was fast asleep within minutes and slept all the way to Beijing. Back home I was still limp all over, not even having the strength to take a shower, and then I fell into another deep, dreamless sleep. I feel that when I took the college entrance examination last year, I really had not been this tired—after all, that only required three days of exams.
Starting today, my summer vacation officially begins. It is a summer vacation of more than fifty days, lasting until I return to school on August 30. But my schedule for this summer is already packed, and I have almost no leisure time. Still, being able to stay in Beijing and be with my family is enough for me.
Today I need to rest a bit more; starting tomorrow, all my work returns to normal.